I Preached on Sunday, on about 24 hours’ Notice. Here is the manuscript, its not as polished as I might have liked, but it practically fell off the tip of my pen (or keyboard, as the case may be). I was in Bend for the weekend with my family when I got the call, and while there I took some pictures, which can be found in the photo galleries. So, without further ado, the sermon:
We have been traipsing through Hebrews this fall, but today we are going to make a small detour.
And although its a bit out of our way, I think it will be helpful for us, &,etc.
Go up to the Mountain: We are not those who shrink back: Exodus 19-20As we have made our way through Hebrews we have seen how the author imagines the readers to be standing, like Israel, on the edge of the Jordan River, about to cross over into the Promised Land. They were afraid, though, because even though God promised it to be a super-abundant land: rich in resources and a place where Israel could call home, they also remembered the stories, the report of the 40 sent into spy out the land, who said to the people of Israel:
“We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we are.”
Israel was afraid, standing there on the edge of the Jordan: for even though the desert had not been a very good home for them, and they had often wished for something different: at least it was familiar. The author of Hebrews imagines us there also, standing at the edge of the Jordan River, and in Hebrews calls to us to leave behind the covenants we have made with this world, to leave behind what is familiar, and step into Christ, in to a Covenant that is completely different. We are called to step into a way of life that is diametrically opposed to what we had known before. As John reminded us last week, this is difficult and it is scary, because it calls us to step into the unknown and the uncontrollable.
The author of Hebrews has another image in mind also, there is another scene from the Old Testament that haunts the text. This week, we’re going to leave the book of Hebrews to focus on this scene for a bit: So turn with me to Exodus chapter 19.
(To be fair to the author of Hebrews, this scene from Exodus really bothered the prophets as well, because it represented for them a decisive, and negative shift, in Israel’s relationship with God.)
Everybody in Exodus? Okay, So, here’s the story so far:
After being delivered from Egypt into … well, into somewhere not much better, the desert … and after being lead to Mt. Sinai by God - you know, pillar of smoke by day, pillar of fire by night - Israel stopped at the foot of the mountain. This was where Israel was to be commissioned as a Kingdom of Priests: So, Pick up reading with me in Chapter 19:1Read Chapter 19:1-9
“In the third month after the Israelites went out from the land of Egypt, on the very day, they came to the Desert of Sinai. After they journeyed from Rephidim, they came to the Desert of Sinai, and they camped in the desert; Israel camped there in front of the mountain.
Moses went up to God, and the LORD called to him from the mountain, “Thus you will tell the house of Jacob, and declare to the people of Israel: ‘You yourselves have seen what I did to Egypt and how I lifted you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. And now, if you will diligently listen to me and keep my covenant, then you will be my special possession out of all the nations, for all the earth is mine, and you will be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you will speak to the Israelites.”
So Moses came and summoned the elders of Israel. He set before them all these words that the LORD had commanded him, and all the people answered together, “All that the LORD has commanded we will do!” So Moses brought the words of the people back to the LORD.The LORD said to Moses, “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people may hear when I speak with you and so that they will always believe in you.” And Moses told the words of the people to the LORD.
As readers who have followed Israel this far, who have watched Israel go into captivity, who have witnessed the amazing way God had delivered Israel up from slavery, and as readers who remember the promises God made to Abraham, we should be getting excited: here at last, God is about to commission these descendants of Abraham, he is about to make good on His promises, He is about to transform these dusty former slaves into a priesthood. This is exciting, lets continue reading:
Read Chapter 19:10-15
The LORD said to Moses, “Go to the people and sanctify them today and tomorrow, and make them wash their clothes and be ready for the third day, for on the third day the LORD will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. You must set boundaries for the people all around, saying, ‘Take heed to yourselves not to go up on the mountain nor touch its edge. Whoever touches the mountain will surely be put to death! No hand will touch him - but he will surely be stoned or shot through, whether a beast or a human being; he must not live.’ When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast they may go up on the mountain.”Then Moses went down from the mountain to the people and sanctified the people, and they washed their clothes. He said to the people, “Be ready for the third day. Do not go near your wives.”
Okay, that makes sense, right? God is a holy God, and his priests are to be holy also - clean, pure, set apart. Ministering before God is serious business, and it requires a certain amount of preparation.
Lets Keep Reading:
Read Chapter 19:16-19
On the third day in the morning there was thunder and lightning and a dense cloud on the mountain, and the sound of a very loud horn; all the people who were in the camp trembled. Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God, and they took their place at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was completely covered with smoke because the LORD had descended on it in fire, and its smoke went up like the smoke of a great furnace, and the whole mountain shook violently. When the sound of the horn grew louder and louder, Moses was speaking and God was answering him with a voice.
We have noise, we have earthquakes, smoke, fire, horns blowing! This is getting intense!
Read Chapter 19:20-25
The LORD came down on Mount Sinai, on the top of the mountain, and the LORD summoned Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. The LORD said to Moses, “Go down and solemnly warn the people, lest they force their way through to the LORD to look, and many of them perish. Let the priests also, who approach the LORD, sanctify themselves, lest the LORD break through against them.”Moses said to the LORD, “The people are not able to come up to Mount Sinai, because you solemnly warned us, ‘Set boundaries for the mountain and set it apart.’” The LORD said to him, “Go, get down, and come up, and Aaron with you, but do not let the priests and the people force their way through to come up to the LORD, lest he break through against them.” So Moses went down to the people and spoke to them.
So Far this has gone according to plan: God in his absolute and terrifying holiness is calling his people to be a priesthood, set apart to himself. The people, it says, trembled - which is pretty good, I would have wet myself.
At this point God speaks the ten commandments, which serve to increase the gravity of the event - which, I might add again, is going well so far: Pick up with me in Chapter 20, verse 18:
Read Chapter 20:18-21
All the people were seeing the thundering and the lightning, and heard the sound of the horn, and saw the mountain smoking - and when the people saw it they trembled with fear and kept their distance. They said to Moses, “You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak with us, lest we die.” Moses said to the people, “Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of him may be before you so that you do not sin.” The people kept their distance, but Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was.
This is the passage that had bothered the Prophets, and that sits ominously in our peripheral vision as we read Hebrews, so lets unpack it a bit.
First of all, lets just recognize how terrifying this mountain was! To approach God is to be laid bare: all of us is exposed to us before him, its a terrifying prospect, not just to be so exposed before the Almighty, but also to be so exposed to ourselves. Its rare that we see ourselves as clearly as we see ourselves when we enter the presence of God. Even thought God is inviting us up to the mountain, even with Him beckoning to us, its a terrifying experience to be in the presence of God. Remember briefly some of the other times when people in the Bible found themselves placed in God’s presence:
In Judges, after the angel of the Lord leaves them, Manoah says to his wife: “We will certainly die, because we have seen God!”
In Isaiah chapter 6, Isaiah, finding himself in the throne room of God, says: “Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live amongst a people contaminated by sin!”
In the New Testament, Peter, after Jesus calms the storm, cries out: “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinner.”
It is a terrifying experience to be called into the presence of God, and if being laid bare before Him is terrifying to you, you’re in good company.
Even though this mountain was terrifying, we must also remember Israel was being commissioned by God to be Priests: this was to be the decisive moment for Israel. God was to be especially present amongst them. Even though God had been present among Israel up to this point - he had worked the miraculous on their behalf delivering them out of Egypt, he had lead them through Red Sea first, and then through the desert, going ahead of them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night - even though God had been around and had shown Himself powerful on Israel’s behalf, What God was calling Israel to now in this moment was different: Israel was to be a Kingdom of Priests. They were to be God’s representatives on the Earth, for the Earth.What happened, then? They shrunk back, they said, “you go up for us, Moses,” they kept their distance, they shrunk back.
In that moment, by shrinking back, Israel was transformed from a kingdom of priests into a kingdom in need of priests. They now needed a special group of people to do for them what they were to do for the whole Earth. It is no coincidence that just after this passage God starts talking about alters and sacrifices.
This is why the prophets were haunted by this moment in Israel’s history, and this is by the author of Hebrews is so insistent: We must go up! We must cross the Jordan! we must step into the life and the kingdom that God has called up to in Christ. We must do business with the Almighty: we must be laid bare in his presence. For only be doing so can we be transformed - be commissioned - as a Kingdom of Priests like Jesus. We must step into the holy of holies, we must go up to the mountain.
Peter, the one who once said to Jesus, “Go away from me, for I am a sinner,” He puts it this way in 1 Peter 2:
So as you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but chosen and priceless in God’s sight, you yourselves, as living stones, are built up as a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood and to offer spiritual sacrifices that are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.
He’s speaking to Christians, to us! And again:
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own, so that you may proclaim the virtues of the one who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light. You once were not a people, but now you are God’s people. You were shown no mercy, but now you have received mercy.
Recognize that language? It comes straight from Exodus! We are also being called up to the Mountain! Except for us, Jesus has Gone before us, he has shown us what it is to be a Priest of the Most High, and to be a Kingdom of Priests. This is the Commission that the author of Hebrews wants to tell us about!
Mom’s Foster Care as Priesthood:
When I was in fifth grade, my parents became Foster parents, and our home from that point on played host to a revolving group of quasi-siblings. As the years past, My mother found her niche in the world of Foster care: She is a medical Foster Mom, and her specializes in Drug affected Babies. Oh whom, there was never a lack: in fact, she has two now.I didn’t see it this way then, but there is no doubt in my mind now that my mother acts as a priest for those children for whom she cares. She stands between them and the horrible situations out of which they were taken, she cares for them, she prays for them, she is Jesus to them. And it takes an incredible about of physical and emotional energy. Some of those babies are not fixable: no amount of love or good parenting will mend their brokenness. Some of those babies will never know how much was given for them: But she doesn’t do it because it works, she does it because she is a priest of Jesus.
And this Jesus has called us to: caring for broken babies, yes: but also caring for brokenness in general.
As Priests we are called to stand in God’s place, to stand in for God, for the world. We are called Ambassadors in 2 Corinthians, “as though God were making his appeal through us,” it says. A priest stands between God and those for whom she is a priest.
To be such a priest we must first go up on the mountain: as priests we have to do business with the Almighty. We have to be laid bare before him: on the mountain of God we cannot hide behind our constructed selves, we are not put together, we are vulnerable. On the mountain of God we are seen and we see our selves as we really are: we are naked, and we are loved.
This is the foundation of a priesthood: that we are stripped of our masks, of the selves that we construct for the sake of others - to appear well before them, or so as to defend our hearts from them. On the mountain of God all this falls away. It is a scary proposition to consider standing before God like this in the privacy of our closets, but it is downright terrifying to imagine what it would be like to be a Kingdom of Priests: to be a people who are go up to the mountain together.But we do go up together, and as terrifying as the prospect is, we can’t do this priesthood alone; we are to be priests for each other as well, only when we do so will we have the resources to reach out to those have not received mercy - as the text says.
To be a priest is to stand in god’s place for the world: as though we were acting in God’s stead
There are a bunch of metaphors in the New Testament that paint a picture of this for us: we are Christ’s Body, the hands and feet of Christ, who is our head: when Christ wants to get something done in this world he uses his body, he uses us. We are also the Household of God - this is a rich metaphor also! - we belong to God as children, for sure, but we are also the temple of God, not built with stones and mortar, but with people held together by God’s own Spirit: As the temple we can say that God is uniquely present here in his temple. But just like the Temple of old or the tabernacle: God’s presence is not here merely because He needs a place to rest His head, but because this is the place from which His glory and his holiness is to shine.
In every case, to be a priest is to enter in at the point of sin, at the point of brokenness, at the point where Fallen-ness becomes a burden too difficult to bear. Jesus said that the physician does not tend to the healthy but to the sick, and that is the place of the priest as well: to step in to brokenness as one who reconciles. Again, I remember my mother, who could and would spend a year or more loving and caring for a child who could not be made better, who could not be fixed, and who may just be sent back into a horrible situation. In that time, the child might not become attached, might not respond to the love that was lavished on it. To love in the face of rejection: She never would have survived if her strength came from her success, her strength had to come from the God whose priest she was. Its the same for us: If we are to be a priest for god, we have to depend on God for our strength: and we have also to depend on each other to be priests for us.
We have to go up to the mountain, we have to go up together, we have to step into the land.
The Author of Hebrews is haunted by this scene in Exodus: this is why our author goes to such great pains to convince us that Jesus is a different sort of Priest for us, why Jesus’ priestly act and priestly sacrifice inaugurates a new covenant. This is why the Author implores us not to shrink back, but to step into Jesus’ Kingdom of Priests.
Entries (RSS)